Habitual criminal legislation in New Zealand: Three years of three-strikes

Abstract

Habitual felon legislation is not new, but during the last 20 years it has become a powerful instrument of penal populism. Since passage of California's landmark 1994 three-strikes initiative, more than 100,000 offenders have been incarcerated in that state, contributing to prison crowding so serious that, in 2011, in Brown v. Plata, the United States Supreme Court ordered California to reduce its prison population by 46,000 persons. While the Californian three-strikes law is unusually draconian, habitual offender legislation also has been enacted in Australia and, more recently, in New Zealand. While little official data are available about New Zealand’s three-strikes law, preliminary analysis indicates that minority groups are overrepresented in the three-strikes population, and that three-strikes demographics resemble those of the New Zealand general prison population.